Bedford/St. Martin's - The Bedford Bibliography

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Advanced Composition

429
Adams, Katherine H. "Bringing Rhetorical Theory into the Advanced Writing Class." Rhetoric Review 3 (1985): 184–89.

Rhetorical theory and research in writing can enhance advanced writing courses. Advanced students are capable of appreciating empirical research. They identify, for example, with the problems attested to by writers in protocol analyses and learn from the research on the effects of revision. Testimony by professional writers can encourage students to see the connection between writing and their own disciplines and careers. Grounding in the history of rhetoric reinforces students' sense of the importance and value of speaking to real audiences. The theories of Plato and others can be effectively applied to current examples of attempted persuasion. Research on heuristics can be an antidote to the current-traditional model that most students learned in freshman composition. This material does not need to become the course, but can be incorporated in workshops and discussions.

430
Adams, Katherine H. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges. Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1993.

Professional writing courses began around 1900 as attempts to meet the need for instruction beyond freshman composition and to respond to vocational and professional pressures on the university. At first, instructors were literature faculty, but soon professional writers were brought in. These professionals taught genres and formats particular to their fields—poetry, journalism, business, technology. This training expanded to study of actual rhetorical situations in the field. Soon, as such courses seemed increasingly anomalous in English departments, journalism became a separate program. Creative writing, linked to literature, remained in English. Technical and business writing never gained sufficient support from business and technical departments to become independent programs and so remained peripheral parts of English departments. After World War II, more advanced writing courses and programs appeared, typically following public events: scientific writing grew during the space race, journalism following Watergate. Professional writing courses have always been dogged by the question of whether they are necessary: could practical writing be learned better out in the field? Were theory-based courses worthwhile? Were they good uses of curricular time? Despite such questions, many schools now offer professional-writing minors and majors, a trend that appears likely to continue.

431
Adams, Katherine H. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as rhetoric shrank to freshman composition, a number of forces combined to create advanced composition courses. In traditional universities like Harvard, advanced writing courses were designed to improve sophistication and fluency. The Progressive movement, though focused educationally on lower schools, influenced the creation of journalism courses and programs at the turn of the twentieth century through its emphasis on citizenship. Advanced courses in journalism spawned imitators in engineering schools, which began to offer business and technical writing. At the same time, the creation of land grant colleges with their agricultural, commercial, and technical specialization led naturally to advanced courses in business and technical writing, business journalism, and advertising. During this period and since, instruction in persuasive writing—despite the importance of persuasion in American public and business life—remained absent from the general curriculum, even while advanced writing courses developed a wide range of persuasive skills.

432
Adams, Katherine H., and John L. Adams, eds. Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How? Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 1991.

Nineteen essays, seven on theory and the problem of distinguishing advanced from freshman courses, and twelve on approaches to teaching. Essays include Elizabeth Penfield, "Freshman English/Advanced Writing: How Do We Distinguish the Two?"; William Covino, "The Grammar of Advanced Writing"; Michael Carter, "What Is Advanced about Advanced Composition? A Theory of Expertise in Writing"; Michael Keene and Ray Wallace, "Advanced Writing Courses and Programs"; Mary Fuller, "Teaching Style in Advanced Writing Courses"; Sam Watson, "Letters on Writing—A Medium of Exchange with Students of Writing"; Jeanne Fahnestock, "Teaching Argumentation in the Junior-Level Course"; Timothy Donovan and Janet Carr, " 'Real World' Research: Writing Beyond the Curriculum"; and Lynn Bloom, "Creative Nonfiction, Is There Any Other Kind?" Includes "Afterword: Needed Scholarship in Advanced Composition" by Gary Olson, and an annotated bibliography of twenty-eight articles on advanced composition.

433
Covino, William A. "Defining Advanced Composition: Contributions from the History of Rhetoric." Journal of Advanced Composition 8 (1988): 113–22.

In their demand for rigor in managing broad and difficult topics and reducing their complexity, advanced composition courses reflect a post-Cartesian notion of advanced knowledge as schematized and well-ordered. Advanced writing students must demonstrate mastery of the conventions of closure, both in composition and, often, in an academic discipline as well. But the post-Cartesian model can be challenged by the older Classical definition of advanced rhetors as more tolerant of ambiguity. Poor rhetors must rely on formulae, whereas better ones probe and search freely. Plato and Cicero depict questioning dialogists as superior to those who seek simple answers or summaries. Montaigne, Vico, and De Quincey criticize Descartes and support the dialogic-dialectical approach to the lost art of rhetoric. As a model for advanced composition, the dialogic approach suggests that research and writing be used to defer judgment, to explore a variety of perspectives on an issue, and to set aside conviction in order to practice rhetoric.

434
Hairston, Maxine. "Working with Advanced Writers." CCC 35 (1984): 196–208.

Advanced writers—honors freshmen and other students taking an elective advanced expository writing course—are reluctant to change writing habits that are earning them good grades, despite felt dissatisfaction with their own writing. Their writing is correct, wordy (repetitive and inflated), heavily nominalized, impersonal, unrealistically ambitious, overly generalized, and without much sense of audience. Their personalities are hidden behind the mask of a bureaucrat or pedantic scholar. They see this style as officially sanctioned; it has earned them rewards, and it is also safe. To persuade them to try anything new, a safe classroom is necessary, where grades are downplayed, risk is rewarded, and a writing community is formed.

435
Olson, Gary A., and Julie Drew, eds. Landmark Essays on Advanced Composition. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.

Twenty-four previously published essays and an extensive bibliography on the history, curriculum, and theory of advanced composition. Included are several surveys of the field from 1980 and 1990; the 1967 CCCC guidelines for advanced composition; William Covino, "Defining Advanced Composition: Contributions from the History of Rhetoric" [433]; Carol Snyder, "Analyzing Classifications: Foucault for Advanced Writers" [438]; Susan Hilligoss, "Preoccupations: Private Writing and Advanced Composition"; Katherine Adams, "Bringing Rhetorical Theory into the Advanced Writing Class" [429]; and Kate Ronald, "The Politics of Teaching Professional Writing."

436
Ramage, John. "From Profession to Discipline: The Politics of Establishing a Writing Concentration." Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 2000.

The development of an advanced undergraduate writing program usually entails the following: resistance from literature colleagues worried about encroachment; the necessity of collectively defining and enacting a disciplinary identity; and the likelihood of having to debate "secession" (from the English department) and "abolition" (of first-year composition). The toughest issues often have less to do with resources and institutional support than with department-internal politics. Local circumstances will guide answers, but critical factors can be identified that need to be accounted for by any program undergoing the change of identity that is effected by instituting an advanced undergraduate writing curriculum.

437
Shamoon, Linda K., Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, and Robert A. Schwegler. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 2000.

Advanced composition has come to take a wide range of shapes and forms, reflecting new developments in the teaching of writing. The thirty-four entries here reflect the emerging variety of advanced composition from traditional business and technical writing courses to visual communication, civic discourse, and cultural studies courses. Each short essay provides both theoretical discussion and practical information on assignments and syllabi. Included are Lynn Bloom, "Advancing Composition"; Deepika Bahri, "Postcolonial Writing"; Rebecca Howard, "Style, Race, Culture, Context"; Richard Leo Enos, "The History of Rhetoric"; Sandra Jamieson, "Theories of Composing"; Dennis Baron, "Literacy and Technology"; John C. Bean, "Seeking the Good: A Course in Advanced Argument"; Patricia Bizzell, "Writing as a Means of Social Change"; Diana George, "Cultural Studies"; Bruce Herzberg, "Civic Literacy and Service Learning"; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, "Computers and Communication"; Mary Lay, "Technical Communication"; Kitty O. Locker, "Writing for and about Business and Nonprofit Organizations"; and John Ramage, "From Profession to Discipline: The Politics of Establishing a Writing Concentration" [436].

438
Snyder, Carol. "Analyzing Classifications: Foucault for Advanced Writers." CCC 35 (1984): 209–16.

Classifications structure discourse in the disciplines, and advanced students are often expected to explain them in their papers. But students typically misunderstand the provisional nature of classification schemes, treating them as permanent and not subject to analysis or change. They can learn much from Foucault, who compares earlier and later classification systems in a field to see changes in the ways that we conceive our subjects. Foucault also analyzes classification schemes as codes with the power to shape social and intellectual reality and to vest that power in certain people and institutions. Students readily add their own examples to Foucault's pictures of the division of people into categories and their distribution into social and physical spaces. Taught to identify the object of classification, the exclusions of the classifying scheme, the people who use the scheme, and the time and space frames of the scheme, students are able to analyze classification systems in their own disciplines, discovering much about the field's history and lines of power.

439
Trimbur, John. "The Problem of Freshman English (Only): Toward Programs of Study in Writing." WPA: Writing Program Administration 22.3 (Spring 1999): 9–30.

Despite the powerful sense of mission that accompanies the first-year course in writing, our attachment to a single course leads to an oversaturation of the curriculum while the single-minded focus on the first-year course also makes it difficult to compare models and theorize program design. Programs of study in writing would position the first-year course as introductory to the intellectual study of writing, a move that would help to expand the forum for negotiating differences in the theories and agendas that currently divide the field. The assumption that writing instruction must take place in English-Only environments can be traced to its origins, where the formation of the first-year course severed writing in English from its association with classical languages. English achieved its dominance both as a department and as a modern language in part because of the required first-year course, and mastery of English Only has made Freshman English First Worldist at the level of both language and culture. Program design must intersect with multiple constituencies and serve multiple purposes without departmentalizing knowledge. One of the central challenges facing program design is to imagine writing instruction and curriculum from an internationalist perspective.

429	Adams, Katherine H. "Bringing Rhetorical Theory into the Advanced Writing Class." Rhetoric Review 3 (1985): 184–89. Rhetorical theory and research in writing can enhance advanced writing courses. Advanced students are capable of appreciating empirical research. They identify, for example, with the problems attested to by writers in protocol analyses and learn from the research on the effects of revision. Testimony by professional writers can encourage students to see the connection between writing and their own disciplines and careers. Grounding in the history of rhetoric reinforces students' sense of the importance and value of speaking to real audiences. The theories of Plato and others can be effectively applied to current examples of attempted persuasion. Research on heuristics can be an antidote to the current-traditional model that most students learned in freshman composition. This material does not need to become the course, but can be incorporated in workshops and discussions.
430	Adams, Katherine H. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges. Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1993. Professional writing courses began around 1900 as attempts to meet the need for instruction beyond freshman composition and to respond to vocational and professional pressures on the university. At first, instructors were literature faculty, but soon professional writers were brought in. These professionals taught genres and formats particular to their fields—poetry, journalism, business, technology. This training expanded to study of actual rhetorical situations in the field. Soon, as such courses seemed increasingly anomalous in English departments, journalism became a separate program. Creative writing, linked to literature, remained in English. Technical and business writing never gained sufficient support from business and technical departments to become independent programs and so remained peripheral parts of English departments. After World War II, more advanced writing courses and programs appeared, typically following public events: scientific writing grew during the space race, journalism following Watergate. Professional writing courses have always been dogged by the question of whether they are necessary: could practical writing be learned better out in the field? Were theory-based courses worthwhile? Were they good uses of curricular time? Despite such questions, many schools now offer professional-writing minors and majors, a trend that appears likely to continue.
431	Adams, Katherine H. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as rhetoric shrank to freshman composition, a number of forces combined to create advanced composition courses. In traditional universities like Harvard, advanced writing courses were designed to improve sophistication and fluency. The Progressive movement, though focused educationally on lower schools, influenced the creation of journalism courses and programs at the turn of the twentieth century through its emphasis on citizenship. Advanced courses in journalism spawned imitators in engineering schools, which began to offer business and technical writing. At the same time, the creation of land grant colleges with their agricultural, commercial, and technical specialization led naturally to advanced courses in business and technical writing, business journalism, and advertising. During this period and since, instruction in persuasive writing—despite the importance of persuasion in American public and business life—remained absent from the general curriculum, even while advanced writing courses developed a wide range of persuasive skills.
432	Adams, Katherine H., and John L. Adams, eds. Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How? Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 1991. Nineteen essays, seven on theory and the problem of distinguishing advanced from freshman courses, and twelve on approaches to teaching. Essays include Elizabeth Penfield, "Freshman English/Advanced Writing: How Do We Distinguish the Two?"; William Covino, "The Grammar of Advanced Writing"; Michael Carter, "What Is Advanced about Advanced Composition? A Theory of Expertise in Writing"; Michael Keene and Ray Wallace, "Advanced Writing Courses and Programs"; Mary Fuller, "Teaching Style in Advanced Writing Courses"; Sam Watson, "Letters on Writing—A Medium of Exchange with Students of Writing"; Jeanne Fahnestock, "Teaching Argumentation in the Junior-Level Course"; Timothy Donovan and Janet Carr, " 'Real World' Research: Writing Beyond the Curriculum"; and Lynn Bloom, "Creative Nonfiction, Is There Any Other Kind?" Includes "Afterword: Needed Scholarship in Advanced Composition" by Gary Olson, and an annotated bibliography of twenty-eight articles on advanced composition.
433	Covino, William A. "Defining Advanced Composition: Contributions from the History of Rhetoric." Journal of Advanced Composition 8 (1988): 113–22. In their demand for rigor in managing broad and difficult topics and reducing their complexity, advanced composition courses reflect a post-Cartesian notion of advanced knowledge as schematized and well-ordered. Advanced writing students must demonstrate mastery of the conventions of closure, both in composition and, often, in an academic discipline as well. But the post-Cartesian model can be challenged by the older Classical definition of advanced rhetors as more tolerant of ambiguity. Poor rhetors must rely on formulae, whereas better ones probe and search freely. Plato and Cicero depict questioning dialogists as superior to those who seek simple answers or summaries. Montaigne, Vico, and De Quincey criticize Descartes and support the dialogic-dialectical approach to the lost art of rhetoric. As a model for advanced composition, the dialogic approach suggests that research and writing be used to defer judgment, to explore a variety of perspectives on an issue, and to set aside conviction in order to practice rhetoric.
434	Hairston, Maxine. "Working with Advanced Writers." CCC 35 (1984): 196–208. Advanced writers—honors freshmen and other students taking an elective advanced expository writing course—are reluctant to change writing habits that are earning them good grades, despite felt dissatisfaction with their own writing. Their writing is correct, wordy (repetitive and inflated), heavily nominalized, impersonal, unrealistically ambitious, overly generalized, and without much sense of audience. Their personalities are hidden behind the mask of a bureaucrat or pedantic scholar. They see this style as officially sanctioned; it has earned them rewards, and it is also safe. To persuade them to try anything new, a safe classroom is necessary, where grades are downplayed, risk is rewarded, and a writing community is formed.
435	Olson, Gary A., and Julie Drew, eds. Landmark Essays on Advanced Composition. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. Twenty-four previously published essays and an extensive bibliography on the history, curriculum, and theory of advanced composition. Included are several surveys of the field from 1980 and 1990; the 1967 CCCC guidelines for advanced composition; William Covino, "Defining Advanced Composition: Contributions from the History of Rhetoric" [433]; Carol Snyder, "Analyzing Classifications: Foucault for Advanced Writers" [438]; Susan Hilligoss, "Preoccupations: Private Writing and Advanced Composition"; Katherine Adams, "Bringing Rhetorical Theory into the Advanced Writing Class" [429]; and Kate Ronald, "The Politics of Teaching Professional Writing."
436	Ramage, John. "From Profession to Discipline: The Politics of Establishing a Writing Concentration." Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 2000. The development of an advanced undergraduate writing program usually entails the following: resistance from literature colleagues worried about encroachment; the necessity of collectively defining and enacting a disciplinary identity; and the likelihood of having to debate "secession" (from the English department) and "abolition" (of first-year composition). The toughest issues often have less to do with resources and institutional support than with department-internal politics. Local circumstances will guide answers, but critical factors can be identified that need to be accounted for by any program undergoing the change of identity that is effected by instituting an advanced undergraduate writing curriculum.
437	Shamoon, Linda K., Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, and Robert A. Schwegler. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 2000. Advanced composition has come to take a wide range of shapes and forms, reflecting new developments in the teaching of writing. The thirty-four entries here reflect the emerging variety of advanced composition from traditional business and technical writing courses to visual communication, civic discourse, and cultural studies courses. Each short essay provides both theoretical discussion and practical information on assignments and syllabi. Included are Lynn Bloom, "Advancing Composition"; Deepika Bahri, "Postcolonial Writing"; Rebecca Howard, "Style, Race, Culture, Context"; Richard Leo Enos, "The History of Rhetoric"; Sandra Jamieson, "Theories of Composing"; Dennis Baron, "Literacy and Technology"; John C. Bean, "Seeking the Good: A Course in Advanced Argument"; Patricia Bizzell, "Writing as a Means of Social Change"; Diana George, "Cultural Studies"; Bruce Herzberg, "Civic Literacy and Service Learning"; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, "Computers and Communication"; Mary Lay, "Technical Communication"; Kitty O. Locker, "Writing for and about Business and Nonprofit Organizations"; and John Ramage, "From Profession to Discipline: The Politics of Establishing a Writing Concentration" [436].
438	Snyder, Carol. "Analyzing Classifications: Foucault for Advanced Writers." CCC 35 (1984): 209–16. Classifications structure discourse in the disciplines, and advanced students are often expected to explain them in their papers. But students typically misunderstand the provisional nature of classification schemes, treating them as permanent and not subject to analysis or change. They can learn much from Foucault, who compares earlier and later classification systems in a field to see changes in the ways that we conceive our subjects. Foucault also analyzes classification schemes as codes with the power to shape social and intellectual reality and to vest that power in certain people and institutions. Students readily add their own examples to Foucault's pictures of the division of people into categories and their distribution into social and physical spaces. Taught to identify the object of classification, the exclusions of the classifying scheme, the people who use the scheme, and the time and space frames of the scheme, students are able to analyze classification systems in their own disciplines, discovering much about the field's history and lines of power.
439	Trimbur, John. "The Problem of Freshman English (Only): Toward Programs of Study in Writing." WPA: Writing Program Administration 22.3 (Spring 1999): 9–30. Despite the powerful sense of mission that accompanies the first-year course in writing, our attachment to a single course leads to an oversaturation of the curriculum while the single-minded focus on the first-year course also makes it difficult to compare models and theorize program design. Programs of study in writing would position the first-year course as introductory to the intellectual study of writing, a move that would help to expand the forum for negotiating differences in the theories and agendas that currently divide the field. The assumption that writing instruction must take place in English-Only environments can be traced to its origins, where the formation of the first-year course severed writing in English from its association with classical languages. English achieved its dominance both as a department and as a modern language in part because of the required first-year course, and mastery of English Only has made Freshman English First Worldist at the level of both language and culture. Program design must intersect with multiple constituencies and serve multiple purposes without departmentalizing knowledge. One of the central challenges facing program design is to imagine writing instruction and curriculum from an internationalist perspective.